SEO Checklist for Your WordPress Site

A well-designed website with high-quality content does not worth a penny if nobody knows that it exists. On the other hand, an optimized webpage will be easily discovered during an organic search. That’s why you need SEO to generate an indefinite stream of traffic.

If you have a WordPress site, then you are halfway to a grand beginning with your site’s optimization process because WordPress is created with high consideration for SEO and it is flexible. This implies that you can create an SEO tactic that will match your unique need.

Before you can optimize a WordPress site, there are things you have to consider and know. You have to check your plugins and themes to make sure you’ve got the best setup. This piece will give you a comprehensive checklist of SEO for your site optimization.

Verify WordPress Settings

There are some settings on WordPress that usually have a great consequence on SEO. People often forget these settings out of anxiety for lunching of their site. Before you launch your site, ensure you verify the following settings.

Settings > General

Check to see if the site tagline and title are correctly set. When you install WordPress, the title is usually set but the tagline is always by default. The default setting will come up in the search listing if you are not careful. Remember to modify the tagline to meaningful one, or you can remove it.

Settings > Permalinks

Good SEO permalinks are already set on WordPress. But you have to check if that is the best for your site. Post name is normally correct. However, you need to check the day/ name and month/ name if you publish often.

Settings > Reading

When building a new site, the programmer search engines may be blocked and forgotten after the website launch. Ensure you check out the site’s search engine appearance before you launch your site.

Use Proper Markup for Your Theme

In SEO, the WordPress theme usually has a lasting impact. Older themes will make it difficult for search engine to index your site’s content while a well-prepared theme will have a positive impact. Ensure you have the following in your site’s theme:

HTML5 Semantic Mark-up

Fundamentally, you are searching for themes containing HTML5 semantic mark-up. This implies that your content is distinguished with tags like header and footer, articles and aside. Also, wrap Navigation in a tag. And use h1 headings for page or post titles.

These tags provide some context to search engines when evaluating your website. Your website may look normal ordinarily, but the search bots‘ll spot a markup to index your content efficiently.

Structured Data

There is an inclusion structure data from schema.org at the end of the feature scale. And for reviews, events and a person a descriptive attribute is added. You can also make use of breadcrumb navigation to provide extra information for the search engines which could be shown in the search result. For instance, have you ever notice star rating in any listing? That is from a structured data.

This is very easy to add in if you are building your theme yourself, however, if you are using a 3rd party theme, you need to check if it is included if you find out that it is not added you can add it through many plugins.

Mobile- Friendly Responsive outline

Whether you’re using a 3rd party theme or not, your theme must be responsive on a mobile device. This is usability as well as an SEO issue. Google will not index sites that are not set for mobile in their search results which could deny you of some valuable sales and clicks.

Set up SEO enhancing Plugins

For WordPress sites, there are varieties of SEO boosting plugins you can pick. Whichever you choose depends solely on your preference and need. Yoast SEO has more than five million active installations, and all widely accepts it. Also, all – in – One – SEO Pack has more than three million active users, and it is a good choice. These two plugins are not the o only one available, but there are the ones that are very common and widely used by site owners. Irrespective of the one you choose, you should have these standard features in place:

Optimize each post and Pages

Search engine optimization is not only about your homepage. Your entire site’s content is optimized in a specially way. You will find handy, a plug-in that allows you to maximize each post and page. Ensure that you change the title, description, and keywords. It is good if you could also turn off the indexing for an exact content individually.

Automatic Optimization

If you don’t want to modify content manually, a plug-in is available to help with that. An ideal SEO plug-in would enable you to modify the title, permalink formula and the description of your content.

Add Open Graph Data

This is important to share your content on social media. Open Graph Data will curate your page title, Meta description and featured images for show on social media platforms like twitter, facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. You will need a plug-in that can add the tags to the website seamlessly.

XML Sitemap

Presenting your site’s XML sitemap to Google is a quick way to get them to index your website content. You need to be able to set up sitemaps and modify content that can add to them.

Analytics

Whatever services you use never forget analytics because it is the only way to determine if your methods are effective. All these features can be added in a single plug-in, and you might decide to use a combo of plugins to achieve this functionality. Whatever method you decide to use, it should be to your site’s advantage.

Sustain Best practice in Content

While working with WordPress, you still need to maintain the best performance in content writing and markups. You need to dig into your website and check out the following:

Appropriate Heading Tags Usage

Because the head tags are not very obvious on WordPress editor some site owners often skip it writers will separate some sections in a page and make it bold. Instead of the semantic H2 tag. Also, the latest Gutenberg editor will significantly help in adding headings as it will make it an insightful process.

Proper Usage of Internal Links

Link related content on your site together. It is suggested for SEO, it will make visitors stay longer on your site as it will prompt them to read more content on your site.

Add ALT Text to Images

All images used in your content need to have an ALT text. It is imperative for accessibility, also it is recommended for SEO by Google too. But if you have a large site, you need to make use of a plug-in to assist you in finding and assigning descriptive text as this will help in time conservation.

Your Site is Officially Optimized

To get your site completely optimized for SEO, you need the perfect theme, content, and plugins. And with these outstanding tools made available to you, you are at liberty to use them optimally to accomplish your goals.

Whether you are about to launch a new website or you need ways to maintain an existing site, take the pain to abide by all the listed point to achieve a good SEO. An extra shot will make a massive difference in every way.